How are things these days?

Basileus
Basileus

I see a lot of the old names around. Are things stable these days? I'm getting the bug again and wondering if it's worth signing back up for a subscription.

«1

Comments

  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    Hey Basileus, I would say things are pretty stable now.  The "bad old days" are gone, and Kallak has excelled in keeping things together.  

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • SkidAce
    SkidAce
    Posts: 830

    I think things have stabilized, and the site is good to go for performing the functions we are used to, an excellent platform.

    But I do feel it is still in a "steady state" mode, with minor improvements on occasion.

  • weasel0
    weasel0
    Posts: 435

    There's even a number(well 1 is a number) who swore this off forever(and old staff who liked it that way) who have made a return even already.

  • Kallak
    Kallak
    Posts: 1,090

    Well, as with basically everything, things could be better; but we're certainly making forward progress (albeit slower than preferred to be sure). Seeing some of the old crowd popping up is definitely awesome - and I hope it continues.

    All the best,
    - Kallak
  • Conan_Lybarian
    Conan_Lybarian
    Posts: 240 edited September 2019

    It's absolutely worth renewing. Now sure what the old features were, but as a pretty active DM, it's got what I need and more. I've only been really active on the site for the last year or so, but it's a fantastic. I keep hearing about "the old days"- but honestly, the site works great for what it focuses on, and improvements ARE being made by some VERY hard working people. I wish there was a more active community but I feel like it has been improving lately.

    Post edited by Conan_Lybarian on

  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998

    Kallak has made a huge difference!  While I am nowhere near as active, nor using most of the ascendant features, I came back....

    Just trying to help out.

  • Kallak
    Kallak
    Posts: 1,090

    I hope to be able to continue doing so. It's been an honor thus far.

    All the best,
    - Kallak
  • Omegabase
    Omegabase
    Posts: 41

    The old 500 errors and most other bugs have been squashed for most of this year.  Been months since i've had any problems.  As long as I have an active RPG campaign going i'll be here.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Arcanearth

    Gammaworld 2754

  • Keryth987
    Keryth987
    Posts: 1,047

    The system is stable and the platform as useful as ever. Glad I never gave up and hung around

  • Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Posts: 358

    Well now. I might just turn up a bit more if that's the case. Pretty solid on a private wiki for most of my stuff atm, but worth considering. How hard is it to restore deleted campaigns from the OP backups? 

    Game Designer, Pro GM, multiple ENnie Award winner

    GM of Planejammer: The Spelljoined (Pathfinder 1e) Campaign of the Year 2011 and still going strong!

    GM of The Planewalker's Guild (Pathfinder 1e) 

    Need a GM? Book me today!

  • Kallak
    Kallak
    Posts: 1,090

    How far back is the deletion?

    All the best,
    - Kallak
  • Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Posts: 358

    Oh I doubt it's anything y'all would find it worth digging into. The deletions are somewhere around 3-5 years ago and it was never meant to be a restorable setup in the beginning. I merely had hopes that might have changed along with all the other positives I'm seeing around here. 

    Game Designer, Pro GM, multiple ENnie Award winner

    GM of Planejammer: The Spelljoined (Pathfinder 1e) Campaign of the Year 2011 and still going strong!

    GM of The Planewalker's Guild (Pathfinder 1e) 

    Need a GM? Book me today!

  • Kallak
    Kallak
    Posts: 1,090

    It's definitely something that is on our wish list. We don't have it right this moment, but in due time I'm sure.

    All the best,
    - Kallak
  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    It's always a welcoming thing to hear of THE OLD GUARD returning!

    heart

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Posts: 358

    Old Guard? Heh, I'm in my 50s now...

    Game Designer, Pro GM, multiple ENnie Award winner

    GM of Planejammer: The Spelljoined (Pathfinder 1e) Campaign of the Year 2011 and still going strong!

    GM of The Planewalker's Guild (Pathfinder 1e) 

    Need a GM? Book me today!

  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    Now GMLoki, you KNOW that's not what I meant.   LOL!  

    Anyway, I'm gonna be 57 in three weeks.  No party.  Just a day off work.

    smiley

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998

    You deserve a party @twiggyleaf  I guess we will have to figure that out...

    Just trying to help out.

  • SkidAce
    SkidAce
    Posts: 830

    I will wait until July to be 57, you go ahead first @twiggyleaf

  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    Hey @SkidAce, I'll let you know what it was like.  

    smiley

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Dungeon_Master_Loki
    Posts: 358

    Huzzah! For once I'm the youngster! Time to sass all of you unmercifully! 

    @kallak  - So I know the old backups are not meant to be restorable archives, but they are a bitch to dig through in a browser, often locking up. Any advice on what viewer I should use with an eye towards cutting content and pasting it over here as I rebuild my hub?

    Gracias!  

     

    Game Designer, Pro GM, multiple ENnie Award winner

    GM of Planejammer: The Spelljoined (Pathfinder 1e) Campaign of the Year 2011 and still going strong!

    GM of The Planewalker's Guild (Pathfinder 1e) 

    Need a GM? Book me today!

  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    @SkidAce, I forgot to let you know about my birthday.  It went by without much ado.  I had a few whiskies the night before, so just DID NOTHING for the actual day.  The following day, we had a family Zoom session with cocktails prepared at each of our homes.  I had a Passion Fruit something or other and a Woo-woo!  Both pretty nice.   How about you????

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998

    What is a Woo Woo asks the ignorant American....

    Just trying to help out.

  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006

    Vodka, Peach Schnapps, Cranberry Juice and a squeeze of fresh lime.

    smiley

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • SkidAce
    SkidAce
    Posts: 830

    @twiggyleaf , sounds like a great time, gives me hope for mine!

  • DerkG
    DerkG
    Posts: 76

    Well, I've never been truly gone-gone... But the past few years I've been running my campaigns using a mediawiki that I heavily customized.

    Now that I'm looking at breathing new life into my Pendragon campaign (https://knights-of-the-realm-1.obsidianportal.com/) I'm glad to see that OP is once again looking healthy enough that I will not have to migrate that campaign but instead can simply continue in place.

    Good job OP, and honestly I had not expected this outcome. Happy to be surprised!

    GM: https://knights-of-the-realm-1.obsidianportal.com/ - a Greater Pendragon Campaign

    GM: https://sagaofthenorth..obsidianportal.com/ - a Dungeon World Campaign

    Player/Scribe: https://thepriceofimmortality.obsidianportal.com/ - a Pathfinder Campaign

    "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius

     

  • thaen
    thaen
    Posts: 1,064

    Thanks @DerkG, we appreciate the vote of confidence!

    Obsidian Portal Developer

  • DerkG
    DerkG
    Posts: 76

    You're welcome! 

    For comparison/shits and giggles, this is one of the mediawiki campaign sites I set up. It is a tonne more work than customizing an OP site, so now that OP is looking much more stable again I would not go down that road anew.

    One thing the mediawiki allowed me to do, that I suspect simply isn't possible on OP, is to do some clever database queries. 

    E.g. for this campaign site: https://tomesoflegend.org/aniburning all the categories on the index page are made using database dives (list the _player_ characters -> show their icons). What characters were in an session, show their icons on the adventure label, etc. Similarly, at the bottom of every character page I show what sessions a character took part in, etc.

    Is there some way to do this kind of stuff in OP? It's not a must have, but it's a nice low maintenance way to link content together, for one. Is there a planned features list for future additions to OP?



    (And again, with OP back up and running, the whole mediawiki + addons route is waaaaaaaaaaaay more work, so do not recommend unless you're really keen on learning mediawiki...)

     

    GM: https://knights-of-the-realm-1.obsidianportal.com/ - a Greater Pendragon Campaign

    GM: https://sagaofthenorth..obsidianportal.com/ - a Dungeon World Campaign

    Player/Scribe: https://thepriceofimmortality.obsidianportal.com/ - a Pathfinder Campaign

    "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius

     

  • thaen
    thaen
    Posts: 1,064

    @DerkG, if I'm misunderstanding anything, feel free to point it out...

     

    list the _player_ characters -> show their icons

    In the Campaign Settings, Advanced tab, there is a checkbox that says "Separate player and non-player characters".  If you check that (and Save), the Characters page will show the Player Characters in a section at the top of the Characters page.

     

    What characters were in an session, show their icons on the adventure label, etc.

    Aside from manually adding this at the top of each Adventure Log so that it shows in the "Preview" part, I can't think of how this would otherwise work.

    If the GM didn't explicitly select the Characters that were in a session, how would the system know?  Or would it just look at the Characters that were linked in the Adventure Log?

    A fairly new feature that might be useful here is the Campaign Settings, Advanced tab, checkbox "Character links show Character IMG when hovered over".  So you could list the Character links at the top of the Adventure Log and they could be hovered over to see the Character IMG.  Not quite the same thing as showing the icons directly, but maybe interesting to you.  You can also expand the size of the Adventure Log "Previews" using custom CSS so that more is available to see on the Adventure Log index.

     

    Similarly, at the bottom of every character page I show what sessions a character took part in, etc.

    There's an existing Feature Request that hasn't been implemented yet to automatically create "backlinks".  So if you linked to a Character in an Adventure Log, then this feature would show a link to that Adventure Log at the bottom of the Character's page.

    Here's the thread if you want to throw your voice behind raising the priority of that Feature Request (ha...I see you already found it):

    https://forums.obsidianportal.com/discussion/5459/absolute-killer-feature-backlinks-what-links-here

     

    Is there a planned features list for future additions to OP?

    Not officially.  We keep an eye on these forums and listen to what is being requested, but also look at actual usage of the system (since the majority of the users don't visit these forums at all).  And some features are not possible until we get some backend technical debt paid down (which we are working on).  So we don't want to promise something and then find out that we can't deliver in a timely fashion.

     

    Obsidian Portal Developer

  • DerkG
    DerkG
    Posts: 76 edited October 2020

    Thanks for the quick response! I'll try and larify where my original question probably wasn't clear enough.

    Generating lists etc from the database

    In the Campaign Settings, Advanced tab, there is a checkbox that says "Separate player and non-player characters".  If you check that (and Save), the Characters page will show the Player Characters in a section at the top of the Characters page.

    I understand (and use) this. What I found particularly powerful when being able to make database calls, is to be able to generate such database extracts and insert them wherever I wanted them. With the backend database, the below code would generate and insert the pictures (that each link to the character page), as shown below.

    I could use any other criteria (e.g. location) to generate the NPCs that are related to a certain location wiki page and include that there, etc.

    {{#ask:[[PCorNPC::Player Character]]
    |?CHARPIC
    |?NAME#
    |format=template
    |template=CharacterListIcon
    |sort=NAME
    }}

    The above obviously is gibberish for OP and only included as an illustration - I'm just wondering if there even is a theoretical possibility to include such things for user access in the future, or would that require a complete redesign? (I do not have a clue what OP looks like 'under water'....)

    Showing what characters were in a session

    Aside from manually adding this at the top of each Adventure Log so that it shows in the "Preview" part, I can't think of how this would otherwise work.

    If the GM didn't explicitly select the Characters that were in a session, how would the system know?  Or would it just look at the Characters that were linked in the Adventure Log?

    The system/database would obviously need to  be told somehow. I knew this was going to be a long shot, just wondered if there were any creative ideas/suggestions.

    A fairly new feature that might be useful here is the Campaign Settings, Advanced tab, checkbox "Character links show Character IMG when hovered over".  So you could list the Character links at the top of the Adventure Log and they could be hovered over to see the Character IMG.  Not quite the same thing as showing the icons directly, but maybe interesting to you.  You can also expand the size of the Adventure Log "Previews" using custom CSS so that more is available to see on the Adventure Log index.

    I saw this, tried it out and looks very neat indeed! Is there a reference what css classes are used to style the popups, so that we can tune this? This may well be the 80% 'quick win'...

    Lists of sessions that characters took part in

    There's an existing Feature Request that hasn't been implemented yet to automatically create "backlinks".  So if you linked to a Character in an Adventure Log, then this feature would show a link to that Adventure Log at the bottom of the Character's page.

    Here's the thread if you want to throw your voice behind raising the priority of that Feature Request (ha...I see you already found it):

    https://forums.obsidianportal.com/discussion/5459/absolute-killer-feature-backlinks-what-links-here

    Yes, and I think I can absolutely make that work. Especially if there will be css tags unique for these backlinks :)

    Again, thanks for the quick response. There's definately things I will be able to work with, and some that I will have to accept will not be there. That's the balance between completely doing your own thing (and a lot of blood, tears and even more swearing) and using an existing platform. Also for the mediawiki solution I borrowed heavily from others, I cannot claim to be the fount of all that knowledge...

    Post edited by DerkG on

    GM: https://knights-of-the-realm-1.obsidianportal.com/ - a Greater Pendragon Campaign

    GM: https://sagaofthenorth..obsidianportal.com/ - a Dungeon World Campaign

    Player/Scribe: https://thepriceofimmortality.obsidianportal.com/ - a Pathfinder Campaign

    "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius

     

  • thaen
    thaen
    Posts: 1,064

    I'm just wondering if there even is a theoretical possibility to include such things for user access in the future, or would that require a complete redesign? (I do not have a clue what OP looks like 'under water'....)

    Theoretically, anything is possible with software, but from a practical standpoint, I doubt we would put in the resources required to implement that kind of scripting.  Mostly because it wouldn't be a very highly used feature, so we'd be spending resources on something that wouldn't benefit the majority of the users.  Custom CSS for example is only used by 13% of Ascendants, and that's a language that has broad applicability and usage.  So this scripting language would be even more niche.

     

    Is there a reference what css classes are used to style the popups, so that we can tune this?

    It's a simple setup.  The link (a tag) has a child of a span tag with a class "avatar-hover", and then that has a child of the img tag.

    Screenclip from Chrome Inspect:

    image

     

    Hope that helps!

     

    Obsidian Portal Developer

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